The Times Magazine 21e’s been arrested so many times
at protests that he’s lost count,
been partially blinded after toxic
chemicals were hurled in his face,
almost died after being poisoned
in Siberia, and then sentenced to
spend almost a decade in a Russian
maximum security prison.
Yet, somehow, Alexei Navalny
keeps on smiling.
A 45-year-old lawyer who rose from
obscurity to become Vladimir Putin’s biggest
domestic opponent, Navalny has been
exposing Kremlin corruption since 2010. His
campaign to dislodge Russia’s ruthless dictator
has inspired unprecedented street protests; at
their height these involved tens of thousands
of people marching through Moscow chanting,
“Putin is a thief.”
With his trademark mixture of wry
humour and undisguised loathing of Putin’s
brutal regime, Navalny made political activism
fashionable, convincing a generation of
previously apathetic Russians that they had
the power to bring about positive change. An
early blog, its posts dotted with smiley faces,
was called Final Battle Between Good and
Neutrality. His slick video alleging that
Putin, 69, is the secret owner of a vast and
spectacularly gaudy palace on the coast
of the Black Sea has been watched more
than 123 million times on YouTube.No wonder, his allies say, that the Kremlin
hates him. No wonder, says Navalny, that
Putin ordered his FSB security service to kill
him with novichok, the banned Soviet-era
nerve agent, and then lock him up when he
had the audacity not only to survive but to
return to Russia.
In February this year, as Russia geared
up to launch its unprovoked invasion of
Ukraine, Navalny went on trial on charges of
embezzling 356 million roubles (£3.1 million)
in donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation
(FBK). In essence, Moscow accused him of
failing to spend the Russian public’s money
on investigating Putin and his notoriously
crooked inner circle, a bizarre claim thathighlighted the Kremlin’s willingness to twist
reality to suit its own ends.
Navalny was tried inside the grim walls of
Penal Colony No 2 near Moscow, the infamous
prison camp where he has been incarcerated
since February 2021, when he was sentenced
to two and a half years on separate fraud
charges. Western governments and human
rights groups, as well as Navalny and his
supporters, say all the charges against him are
politically motivated and aimed at stifling his
attempts to challenge Putin at the ballot box.
Access to the makeshift court was severely
restricted, with members of the press confined
to an adjacent room where they followed the
trial on a television screen. Navalny’s wife
was the only visitor, standing by his side as
he harangued and mocked the judge, the
government and Putin’s war in Ukraine. It was,
his lawyer said, the first case in Russia of a
criminal trial being held inside a prison camp.
Yet despite the Kremlin’s attempt to
isolate Navalny, for many observers the most
memorable images from the trial were of the
gaunt opposition leader grinning and laughing
with his wife and lawyer as if he didn’t have a
care in the world. It was, by any standards, a
remarkable display of defiance.
“To get to the prison-camp court you have
to go past endless checkpoints, barking dogs,
armed guards, all that barbed wire. It’s all
really gloomy and bleak,” says Ilya Yashin,H
PUTIN REFUSES TO SAY NAVALNY’S NAME, REFERRING TO HIM AS ‘THAT GENTLEMAN’
Recovering after novichok poisoning with his wife, YuliaPREVIOUS SPREAD: ANDREY RUDAKOV/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK (far right), son, Zahar (top left), and daughter, Daria
Navalny addresses supporters in Moscow, 2018PUTIN’S WAR